Toto Wolff praises: George Russell "outperformed the car"

(Motorsport-Total.com) - Regarding the British weather, Mercedes Motorsport Director Toto Wolff joked beforehand: "We'll win, hands down!" The weather-sensitive W16 was looking forward to the cooler temperatures at Silverstone after Mercedes had completely collapsed in the sweltering Spielberg. But in qualifying on Saturday ( Formula 1 2025 live in the ticker ), they could only manage fourth place.

"It's just not good enough, that's the truth, isn't it?" Wolff told Sky after the session. "We won fair and square in Montreal, then we had a write-off race. And here we are, where we actually expected to have the best chances."

The cooler weather was actually perfect for the car, and Mercedes had also "dominated" the track last year, as Wolff says, "and that didn't materialize." Russell finished only fourth, and Andrea Kimi Antonelli only seventh, although Wolff believes it's no disaster, given the gap of just 0.137 seconds.

But that was more down to Russell: "George definitely outperformed the car here," praised the team boss. "All the sectors simply came together on that lap, including the tricky turns 3 and 4, which worked out perfectly in this case. And it's a result we have to be happy with."

"Yeah, I'm really happy with that last lap," Russell nods. "Every lap up to that point, we were anywhere between five and eight tenths off the pace, and we were a bit scratching our heads today because we thought the cooler conditions would be more to our liking—and that only happened on the last lap of Q3."

In general, Mercedes was simply "less competitive than we expected." "We just need to understand why that's happening. It's cool, but the track is so fast that you put an incredible amount of energy and temperature into the tires," Russell explains.

"The tires run hotter here than in Canada, even though the track temperature in Canada was 50 degrees Celsius and here it's only 20 to 25 degrees Celsius – but that's simply because of the layout. That shows how relative the whole thing is." Therefore, if it gets hot during the race, Mercedes would have a big problem.

Therefore, Russell is hoping for cold, dry weather for the race. "When it's warm, we struggle; when it's cooler, it's better," he says. "As I said yesterday, we're working really hard to improve that. We're lucky to be racing here this weekend, because two weeks ago in England it was 34 degrees—we shouldn't be racing like that."

As long as it stays cool, everything's fine. "But we still have some kind of surprise box," says Wolff. "If we manage to overheat the tire at 15 degrees, then we definitely have a problem."